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This holiday season, we’re saying thank you to farmers––and agricultural technologists
What would our Thanksgiving weekend have been without food? Feeding the world is important. In a world full of food turmoil, drought, fires, and other natural calamities, it is critical that cutting edge science and evolving technology help protect our food supply chain. The Silicon Prairie may be the most important food production science and…
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Koloni hopes to connect users to bikes, recreation equipment
If you’re looking to be active in a city there are usually a lot of options, but they may not be easy to find options. Where do you bike to rent, or a basketball if you want to shoot hoops at the park for an hour? The Northwest Iowa startup Koloni is hoping to streamline…
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Sioux City is rebooting a bright tech future
Sioux City has a history as a tech leader, and history is about to repeat itself. For those that don’t know, Sioux City was once a hub of cutting-edge technology employing thousands of tech workers. In the late 1980s, Ted Waitt launched Gateway 2000 from his father’s Sioux City cattle farm. The Fortune 500 eventually…
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Sioux City Launch Week begins today
Sioux City Launch Week kicks off today with a wide range of events aimed toward engaging northwest Iowa’s entrepreneurial community and building a strong entrepreneurial ecosystem. Launch week is organized by Iowa’s West Coast Initiative, led by the economic development organizations in Plymouth, Monona and Woodbury counties, which are working together to increase entrepreneurial activity…
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Kauffman provides a grant to the Startup Champions Network
The Startup Champions Network, a national organization of entrepreneurial ecosystem builders with a strong Silicon Prairie presence, announced on October 29 that it received a planning grant from the Kansas City, Missouri-based Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation. An entrepreneurial ecosystem builder is a person who helps facilitate the multi-faceted creation and improvement of the components of…
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Follow-up report: State Expected Venture Values in the Midwest
Following the publication of our article on Tuesday regarding expected values in cities, Silicon Prairie News received multiple requests for more information. There were three primary questions regarding the data. The first question is where and how did you get this information. Silicon Prairie News and its partner organizations use Pitchbook and FormDs.com to identify…
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Iowa City’s Rantizo lands $500K in seed funding
Iowa City-based Rantizo lands convertible debt funding of $500,000. The company, profiled by Silicon Prairie News in September, is part of the Iowa Startup Accelerator in Cedar Rapids and has developed a unique drone technology that delivers targeted spraying, primarily in agricultural applications. In an article written by Clay & Milk following the induction of the…
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Cedar Rapids-based SwineTech raises a new round for planned expansion
In a recent SEC filing, SwineTech disclosed the raising of a $1.5 million debt round to begin its expansion into other states and countries. The company, based in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, is the provider of unique technologies that facilitate piglet safety during pork production. Using multiple proprietary technologies including acoustics and artificial intelligence algorithms, the…
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Why Silicon Prairie communities need to be thinking about where they should be, not just where others are
In doing the research for the Silicon Prairie Annual Report, slated for a November release, Chapman and Company noticed an interesting trend when comparing venture activity (as identified in Pitchbook) in the Midwest. As can be seen in the below graph (which includes Midwest communities that received venture investment in 2017), the order of investment…
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iotaMotion receives $2.1M in additional round of financing
Iowa City, Iowa based medical device company, iotaMotion, filed paperwork with the SEC regarding their October 9, 2018 $2.1 million raise. The company provides cochlear implants (“CI”) to moderate hearing loss sufferers. The device dramatically expands the CI market by moving the bar for access to the devices down to moderate impairments by lowering the…